With a16z's ridiculous, "spiraling to infinity" press release, or more generally the business culture that appropriates from Jorge Luis Borges' works to justify immense profits, one could generally apply Hanlon's Razor to a degree. With this open letter, I don't see that at all. It emanates pure evil and megalomania.
With a P/E of 530 its hard to imagine a better short opportunity in the market. As much as palantir likes to pretend its a software company it is a bespoke software company which has only slightly better scaling laws than a consulting company. Make no mistake I have the utmost respect (if fear is a form of respect) for their surveillance capabilities. But that doesn't justify the market cap.
At a certain point market flows tend to prop up big names, due to so much passive investing being market cap weighted. Those indexes are mostly blind and buy size for size's sake.
The Tesla example is probably a good base case to have. It has a mediocre outlook, extreme valuation, and is no longer minting millionaires, but it's also sort of a mediocre short. Big tends to stay big. (That is, unless capital flows reverse, ex: during the tariff scare, when international money was flowing out of the US for once. Then that same passive complex becomes a liability to those names that heavily lean on it).
> With a P/E of 530 its hard to imagine a better short opportunity in the market
Bitcoin has an infinite P/E.
Edit: P/E is also goofy for barely profitable companies. If you plot earnings on the x axis, P/E on the y, and hold price constant, you'll get a 1/x curve. It's not continuous at zero, and it ramps up quickly.
"The United States is not, and should not be permitted to become, a soft compromise and amalgam of global values and tastes.
A reticence or perhaps incapacity to pronounce and to prefer, beyond the shallow and ritualistic shaming of others in the public sphere that masquerades as thought, has had costs.
A fuller statement of the causes and consequences of this reticence is set forth in The Technological Republic. In short, however, a tolerance of everything, a shallow embrace of all views and perspectives as equally valid, often and unfortunately devolves into a belief in nothing."
All that fluff as a verbal sleigh of hand to twist and reframe CS Lewis' treatise against moral relativism (which proposes as an answer an objective morality derived from the commonalities of global cultures' ethical systems that he calls the "Tao").
Remove the rest of the letter ("In The Abolition of Man...") from this hollow framing, and it would read like a screed against Palantir. Does he have a datacenter hooked up to CS Lewis' grave?
and also Tolkien obviously with the name of the company. I never understood the whole Peter Thiel LOTR-industrial-complex thing that makes a mockery out of the Christian universalism of Lewis and Tolkien. Thiel, Karp and the whole cohort all sound like Oswald Spengler, not like Lewis.
Read so as not to be a fool, soon parted with it's money.
Note some current PE values...
NVIDIA PE: 57,33
Apple PE: 34,62
Microsoft PE: 37,18
Palantir PE: 527,52
The rest of letter, is a kind of anti-woke stance, billionaire victim complex so frequently seen now. Just positioning to align with current US political trends and secure government contracts, especially given Palantir heavy reliance on defense spending.
Alex Karp knows that if you dont aggresively preempt criticism you risk being painted as the villain, so he sets the framing as "pro west" vs. "anti west". It's just a reframing of the capitalism vs communism justification for Vietnam in addition to the wide scale destruction carried out against Latin American democracies. if it looks like a spook, walks like a spook, and quacks like a spook, it's a spook. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Palantir was assisting with the CIA's more clandestine activities like funneling drug money and weapons to terrorist groups opposing inconvenient international leaders.
A letter to shareholder should assume that anyone who has some basic business sense should be able to understand it. I think Buffet says something along the lines that it should make sense to an average shareholder. To this end, the communication has to simplified to make sense.
But this letter in the last 5 paragraphs appears abstruse. What the heck is he trying to say ? It appears to me that the CEO is saying something that makes sense to the 5 friends he hangs out with at a silicon valley pub, ie witty, clever and cute. But not to the average shareholder.
Nvidia and Palantir PE values are at least based on future expectations...
MS and Apple's are based on what? Their margins don't have much room to get better so to increase income by 3-4x they need to increase revenue by a similar factor. Which is hard to imagine.
Or we're just in an asset price bubble, which I think we are.
The Tesla example is probably a good base case to have. It has a mediocre outlook, extreme valuation, and is no longer minting millionaires, but it's also sort of a mediocre short. Big tends to stay big. (That is, unless capital flows reverse, ex: during the tariff scare, when international money was flowing out of the US for once. Then that same passive complex becomes a liability to those names that heavily lean on it).
Bitcoin has an infinite P/E.
Edit: P/E is also goofy for barely profitable companies. If you plot earnings on the x axis, P/E on the y, and hold price constant, you'll get a 1/x curve. It's not continuous at zero, and it ramps up quickly.
I hope he serves grilled cheese and Flavor Aid.
A reticence or perhaps incapacity to pronounce and to prefer, beyond the shallow and ritualistic shaming of others in the public sphere that masquerades as thought, has had costs.
A fuller statement of the causes and consequences of this reticence is set forth in The Technological Republic. In short, however, a tolerance of everything, a shallow embrace of all views and perspectives as equally valid, often and unfortunately devolves into a belief in nothing."
Remove the rest of the letter ("In The Abolition of Man...") from this hollow framing, and it would read like a screed against Palantir. Does he have a datacenter hooked up to CS Lewis' grave?
and also Tolkien obviously with the name of the company. I never understood the whole Peter Thiel LOTR-industrial-complex thing that makes a mockery out of the Christian universalism of Lewis and Tolkien. Thiel, Karp and the whole cohort all sound like Oswald Spengler, not like Lewis.
https://citronresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/OpenAI...
Read so as not to be a fool, soon parted with it's money.
Note some current PE values...
NVIDIA PE: 57,33
Apple PE: 34,62
Microsoft PE: 37,18
Palantir PE: 527,52
The rest of letter, is a kind of anti-woke stance, billionaire victim complex so frequently seen now. Just positioning to align with current US political trends and secure government contracts, especially given Palantir heavy reliance on defense spending.
But this letter in the last 5 paragraphs appears abstruse. What the heck is he trying to say ? It appears to me that the CEO is saying something that makes sense to the 5 friends he hangs out with at a silicon valley pub, ie witty, clever and cute. But not to the average shareholder.
MS and Apple's are based on what? Their margins don't have much room to get better so to increase income by 3-4x they need to increase revenue by a similar factor. Which is hard to imagine.
Or we're just in an asset price bubble, which I think we are.
Palantir’s is based on the probability things get worse and they get more government contracts. In fact, it’s a bet on how much worse things can get.
Definitely not how equities are priced.